Feast of the Holy Innocents, Martyrs
It is difficult, especially this year, not to make a connection between this feast and the Newtown, Connecticut shooting - especially as I find my heart aching as I think of parents whose children are not there this Christmas season. Not just Newtown parents, either, but all parents who are grieving.
Today's gospel lesson (Matthew 2:13-18) speaks to us from a place of immense grief. "A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentation; Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be consoled since they were no more." Today's passage ends with these words, which is appropriate, because how do you go on in the face of both such senseless violence and immense grief?
For those who are not experiencing the fresh pangs of such violence and grief, this kind of story is hard to hear, especially in a season that is supposed to be as joyful as Christmas. Despite the fact that many people suffer during the Christmas holidays because they are not joyful (because family is NOT a safe, happy place for them, or because they have no where to go to find joyfulness), we are often hard on ourselves and others who do not exude the appropriate amount of festivity and joy this season.
The edginess of violence and grief are precisely two of the reasons why people give up faith in God. Did God cause the violence? You could read today's Gospel reading as hinting that Christ's birth would not be fulfilled without Herod having killed all the innocents. Did God's hand therefore lead him to slaughter all those people? That would certainly be a monstrous God - why would we worship him?
Yet there is another way to read the scripture - one that holds both the joy and love that the Christmas season as a whole exudes - and that also remembers and mourns the Holy Innocents. It is to remember that people hurt each other, intentionally and unintentionally. The first reading (1 John 1:5-2:2) clearly names that we are the sinners, we are the ones who live in darkness, we are the ones who lie to ourselves and others - and we are meant to read that alongside the gospel text.
Here's the Good News in spite of it all: God knows our world and us so well, knows that we are prone to sin and violence and doing things to other people that hurt them - but he comes to be with us anyway. Humans hurt innocent children - through abuse, neglect and through horrific shootings like the one two weeks ago. God loves us despite that.
He comes to us as an Innocent Baby himself, puts himself directly among us humans who sometimes hurt each other. (Indeed, God even died at our hands.) God is pretty risky - but he loved us so much that he took the risk to be in this world, our world, with its real, horrific, violence and pain.
If God were merely like Christmas Day, with its joy and saccharine greeting cards and its (sometimes fake) happiness, this world would run him over. But God is not that weak. Indeed, we say that God is all-powerful - which means he is powerful enough to be right here with us, among us, in all our goodness AND our badness. That's the real Christmas, right there. God is with us. All the time.
- Jana M. Bennett